Bail and Sentencing Reform Bill

Honourable senators, the stated aim of Bill C-14 is to protect people from crime. All available evidence makes clear, however, that what this bill proposes — sweeping changes to make bail less accessible, make sentences harsher, and treat youth more like adults in the criminal legal system — will not only fail to meet this goal but actually make communities less safe.

Jails are already full to overflowing with people who have been failed and left behind by every other system: Indigenous and Black folks, youth and those who are poor, homeless or dealing with addictions or disabling mental health issues.

Bill C-14 proposes to incarcerate more of those most marginalized and easiest to catch for longer, both before and after they have been tried, and to drain more scarce resources to pay the costs of incarceration instead of allowing us to invest collectively in building up the safer and healthier communities that all deserve.

The Senate has a crucial role to play in reviewing Bill C-14, as, like too many bills of late, it received little study in the other place: only three committee hearings and no testimony from those experienced with its promise of mass incarceration.

Bill C-14 is supposed to be about addressing crime, including car thefts, retail thefts, breaking and entering and violence, but there is not one scintilla of evidence to support this approach.

I agree with and echo the sponsor of this bill in his emphasis that “. . . policy choices in criminal law should rest more on a factual basis than on the public mood of the day,” as well as his call for more and better data.

As Senator Pupatello reminded us last night, “. . . we should be insisting on” data.

Through the sponsor’s efforts, we now have on the record the extent of the data on which the government relies to support these legislative changes: data from Statistics Canada regarding crime rates. This data indicates that, contrary to the discussions around Bill C-14 that have fed off and fuelled Canadians’ fears about safety in their homes and communities, crime is, in general, decreasing.

What is still crucially missing, however, is the evidence regarding what impact Bill C-14 will have on these crime rates and what concrete improvements the government expects as a result.

Bill C-14 marks the third time in seven years that senators have been asked to pass ever more restrictive bail legislation. Despite our requests for more and disaggregated data, why has none documenting the impact of Bill C-75 or Bill C-48 been collected and studied? Why are we not only doubling but tripling down on these same unsubstantiated approaches, which, if the rhetoric about spiralling crime rates is to be believed, have not worked?

Anthony Doob, a criminology expert and former chair of a ministerial advisory body on legislative implementation, notes:

In most areas of life — whether it be medicine, finance, the environment, or anything else — when one is trying to develop policy to improve the situation or to “fix” something, one normally starts with an attempt to understand exactly what the problem is one is trying to fix. In criminal justice, however, this starting point often seems to be skipped. . . .

Howard Sapers, another former ministerial adviser, a former correctional investigator and current Director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, stresses that:

People in Canada deserve to be safe, but they do not need to be made afraid first. Governments need to stick to the facts when proposing new ways to deny people their Charter rights. It is time to separate fear from fact.

In the absence of robust data, we are left with an information bias: If someone commits violence while on bail, we hear about it in the news, on social media, in this and the other place. We do not hear about the vast majority of people who are released on bail successfully and the exponential growth in the number of people who are jailed unjustly when they could be in community safely.

So what does the data tell us about bail?

First, despite political promises, while it is not clear whom Bill C-14 will actually benefit, we know whom it will disproportionately punish. The government’s own GBA+ analysis acknowledges the “negative differential impacts on Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities.”

Assembly of First Nations — or AFN — National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak has told us in no uncertain terms:

The legislation will disproportionately harm First Nations people, who already face systemic barriers to meeting bail conditions. The proposed reforms would in practice punish our people for being poor, homeless, or in crisis — situations often rooted in colonial policies. . . .

Honourable senators, it is now seven o’clock. Pursuant to rule 3-3(1), I am obliged to leave the chair until eight o’clock, when we will resume, unless it is your wish, honourable senators, to not see the clock.

Is it agreed to not see the clock?

Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.

Some Hon. Senators: No.

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: I hear a “no.”

Honourable senators, leave was not granted. The sitting is, therefore, suspended, and I will leave the chair until eight o’clock.

Honourable senators, continuing with the words of the National Chief:

The proposed reforms would in practice punish our people for being poor, homeless, or in crisis — situations often rooted in colonial policies. We all want greater security, but we will not achieve that through punitive reforms that cause further harm. True safety comes from investing in community-led solutions . . . .

Bill C-14 broadens the use of pretrial detention, without the fair and public hearing to which people are entitled by the Charter before a sanction can be imposed.

Pretrial detention is supposed to be a last resort, where no other alternatives exist to address the risks of a person not showing up for trial, harm or loss of public confidence. And there are alternatives, colleagues.

Instead, discussions of Bill C-14 have adopted a punitive focus on types of charges — things people are alleged to have done.

The bill expands the charges and situations in which a reverse onus applies, whereby, instead of the Crown having to convince a judge to take the extraordinary step of imprisoning someone without a trial, jail is made the norm unless a person can convince a judge they should be released.

Those who cannot make this case — those whose families do not have a spare room for them on bail cannot take the time off work to attend court dates or cannot pledge a significant amount of money as a surety — are disproportionately affected by social and economic inequality.

Bill C-14 will also prevent those with criminal records from acting as sureties, further perpetuating intergenerational trauma and discrimination in families and communities that have already experienced mass incarceration. For Indigenous Peoples in the Prairie provinces, this means that as many as 90% of Indigenous men will be unable to assist even their immediate family members in this manner.

In 1990, Mr. Justice Cawsey found that by the age of 30, 90% of Indigenous men had criminal records.

Second, crime that does occur can hardly be blamed on lax bail policies.

As Dr. Doob notes, Canada is already too “ . . . comfortable detaining large numbers of accused persons prior to trial.”

Today, some 20,000 people in Canada are in pretrial detention, colleagues. That represents 4 out of 5, or 80%, of Canadians in provincial and territorial jails. That is an increase from an already shocking 67% in 2019. That is more than the total number of people, i.e., 14,000, currently serving federal prison sentences.

Court delays mean that people spend months and years awaiting trial in inhumane and overcrowded conditions, including triple bunking, inadequate health care, and ever more prevalent lockdowns and segregation.

I have spoken previously about the mass, retributive violence that guards inflicted on prisoners, at the direction of the administration, at Maplehurst jail in December 2023, for example.

Contrary to the claims of correctional authorities, sadly, such incidents are not outliers. Judges have repeatedly described conditions within jails as “disheartening, if not appalling”; “deeply concerning”; “punitive and cruel”; “wholly unacceptable”; and “consistently failing to meet minimum standards established by the United Nations.”

Nobody, whether pretrial or sentenced, should be subjected to such human rights and Charter violations.

For too many, the quickest way to get out of these inhumane conditions is to plead guilty, even if they have a defence. The pressure to do so is ratcheted up by mandatory minimum penalties. Even a matter of days in pretrial detention can mean that people lose jobs, housing placements and, especially for single moms, their children through child welfare apprehensions.

When people eventually return to the community, even if they are not found guilty, too many find themselves homeless, without a way to earn income, further isolated and marginalized, and at infinitely greater risk of being exploited, criminalized and thrown back in jail.

Dr. Doob summarizes the evidence as follows:

. . . it is almost certain that crime is increased, not decreased, by laws and procedures that increase the likelihood of pretrial detention. Simply put: unnecessary pretrial detention increases crime.

Despite all available data indicating that harsher sentences do not, in fact, deter crime, Bill C-14 encourages harsher sentences.

Indeed, in a brief to the House committee, a former senior bureaucrat indicated that, in previous decades, Justice and Solicitor General staff sought to remove references to deterrence in the Criminal Code given that they reflected outdated research, but — and here’s the kicker, colleagues — they were precluded from doing so for political reasons.

In Bill C-14, this ineffective insistence on harsher sentences goes hand in hand with measures like mandatory consecutive sentencing, which experts, including the Canadian Bar Association and Barreau du Québec, have characterized as attacks on judicial independence.

Besides eroding judicial independence and feeding authoritarian-style narratives that those best placed to determine fit and fair sentences are dangerously overstepping their boundaries by simply doing what the law requires of them, what do these mandatory and reverse onus measures in Bill C-14 achieve?

Bill C-14 will increase the number of bail hearings, exacerbating existing crises of delay and lack of resources within the court system. It will also mean more time spent in prison, both before and after conviction, when provincial jails in Ontario are at 123% capacity right now.

The lack of data from the government means that we do not know how many additional bail hearings may result or how many additional people may be incarcerated. Keeping one person incarcerated pretrial costs some $118,000 per year.

At a time when resources are scarce and Bill C-16 asks us to accept measures to address court delays that endanger Charter-protected rights to timely trials, we must ask why we are pursuing such costly and unproven — except as ineffective — measures that are destined to fail to achieve the public safety outcomes they promise.

So what can we do instead? Research does exist that demonstrates that ensuring access to adequate health, housing, economic and social programming and supports deters and prevents crime.

One example is the Manitoba Mincome experiment, which saw that investment in a guaranteed livable income alone resulted in reduced victimization and crime by 17.5%.

As the Minister of Justice himself has emphasized:

If we make the investments before violence happens, rather than focus exclusively on penalizing people after the crime has taken place, my view is that, in the long term, Canada can become a much safer place.

If we want to improve public safety, we owe it to Canadians to do so in an effective, evidence-based manner.

Colleagues, this is a case of the emperor having no clothes. It is our responsibility to push back. Bill C-14 will neither prevent nor meaningfully address crime. We have a responsibility to not waste taxpayers’ dollars in the name of performative legislation. We have a responsibility to not baselessly condemn people, especially Indigenous Peoples, Black Canadians, youth and people who are unhoused or dealing with mental health and addiction issues, to prison and mass incarceration for the sake of appearing tough on crime.

Let’s fulfill our responsibilities and advocate for the investments needed to build up communities and support and empower people instead of leaving them behind. This is how we will meaningfully enhance public safety.

Meegwetch, colleagues. Thank you.

The quotes that I read from judges who have issued judgments are generally aware that they are reducing sentences, or sometimes rejecting, the continuation of charges. A good example is the Maplehurst case. A number of people, including people who were being, or would have been, tried for murder, were released because they were incarcerated for so long and the conditions were so egregious.

Generally, it is taken into account at the time of sentencing if they are convicted.

What also happens, though, which I did mention, is that the rate of guilty pleas goes up exponentially, and the number of wrongful convictions increases. You are familiar with the report that a number of us were a part of, entitled Injustices and Miscarriages of Justice Experienced by 12 Indigenous Women. Those were all women who were in those kinds of situations.

Jamie Gladue, after whom we named subsection 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, as I have spoken about in this chamber, was one of those individuals. She had the defence of self-defence and defence of another but was offered a plea deal or the option of staying in jail longer. Not surprisingly, most lawyers, especially if you are talking about an Indigenous or Black woman or, for that matter, man — but particularly where the intersections of racism happen — will often encourage their client to take a guilty plea because they cannot guarantee they will receive a fair trial.

Senator Pate, would you take a question?

Yes.

Thank you.

You and I arrived in this place in 2016, and it is now 2026. You have the most expertise of anyone I have ever encountered on issues such as what we’re dealing with in this bill.

My question is this: Are you aware of any credible research — peer-reviewed, with traceable sources, et cetera — that supports the basic premise of this bill? Are you aware of any research that shows that this is an effective way for society to deal with these issues?

Sadly, no, there aren’t any. In fact, the government itself, in 2016, was moving away from this. It is not even in the youth justice legislation. Although, perhaps we’ll start to see it now. The presumption is that deterrence does not work unless you know what is going to happen and there is certainty of being caught. So, it was largely discredited even by the government’s own research.

One of the challenges is that we have been asking for data. It is why I quoted some of our colleagues about the need for data. The provinces have been asked to provide this data. The last time that I was asked to comment on some of these sorts of bail issues, more than half of the jurisdictions have not provided the data to StatCan.

The fact that they then come, asking for these kinds of measures — the premiers and heads of our provincial and territorial governments — is indicative. It is a perception. As government officials, we have an obligation to educate people and do the work that will actually address the issues.

Of course, there are real issues in the community about safety, and there are real issues about crime, but pretending that what we’re doing is going to solve it is just that: pretending.

Thank you.

Will you take a question, Senator Pate?

Yes.

Thank you.

I wanted to ask you about car theft. You just finished by saying that communities want to feel safe. I have had some preliminary conversations about Bill C-14 and safety. My car was stolen on January 4 of this year. I watched the video of that theft. It was perpetrated by three very young people in hoodies. It took them longer to brush the snow off my car than to get into my car with a laptop. Then, they drove off. I felt anger. I worked hard for that car. I understood some of the angst and the struggle we have around this.

But then I thought, “Okay. Is Bill C-14 going to address that?” That is what we’re being told, are we not? We’re being told that Canadians will feel safer, and this will address certain issues. Can you speak to that?

Are those three young people the problem? It felt weird watching that video and feeling conflicted about the car theft.

You may remember when we were dealing with car theft in a budget bill previously that car companies came before the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and acknowledged that, in fact, there are other measures they could be taking —

Senator Pate, your time has expired. Are you requesting more time to answer the question?

With the leave of the chamber, yes.

Is leave granted?

The car companies indicated there were other measures they could take that would interfere with the ignition. I suspect that when you reported your car stolen, you might have had the car company from which you bought the car offer to get you another car. There certainly isn’t an incentive for car companies to put in different measures that would be far more effective in addressing car theft than these measures.

I want to deal with organized crime, and I want to see us go after the significant players who are the puppeteers. However, those who actually get caught are the very types of young people you just described. People recruit young people. They go to schools, shelters or sometimes places where people receive their social assistance checks. They recruit people and offer money to do things when those people have very little.

Now, they are even going to some of the encampments, offering options to people.

We have a huge problem with these kinds of measures encouraging enforcement but only on those who are easiest to catch. If we really wanted to address this, we would insist that car companies implement these kinds of measures. We would insist that when we see a group of three such young people, we look for who is actually paying them. We would ask, who is organizing that ring of three people?

I’m not suggesting, in any way, that there aren’t issues, but the fact that we are coming at them by pulling together what will predominantly be racialized young people in the case of car theft and, in the case of some of the other kinds of theft, they will be those who are the easiest to catch and who are the least privileged. On some of the reserves I have been to, people talk about the fact that there are only two ways to make money: sell your body or sell drugs. That is hideous.

We have to address the root issues and the fact that people have inadequate supports and income, don’t have places to live and are struggling to survive.

Do not hear me as excusing any of these behaviours or saying there aren’t issues, but we’re coming at it in a way that will just fill up our jails instead of addressing who is actually engineering some of this.

We should ask: Who benefits? We should always follow the money. Who benefits from these kinds of approaches? It certainly isn’t those who are likely to be picked up in this case.

Honourable senators, I rise today as the opposition critic to speak to second reading of Bill C-14, the “Bail and Sentencing Reform Act.”

This is yet another piece of Liberal legislation that does attempt to fix the colossal mess the Liberal government has made of Canada’s criminal law regime since 2015. While Bill C-14 is a concrete step, this Liberal government bill still fails to make substantive changes, taking only incremental steps toward restoring public safety, fairness, justice and truth in sentencing, all of which are principles that our former Conservative government held dear under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

All around us, we see the repercussions of more than a decade of the Liberal government’s soft-on-crime approach. We see headlines daily of failed Liberal catch-and-release crime policies, which have resulted in an increase of serious criminals back out on the streets through lax bail and sentencing laws. Too often, we see news stories of horrendous crimes, and, seemingly in almost every story, it is revealed that the alleged perpetrator was out on bail. Some of those offenders commit a staggering number of repeat crimes, taking advantage of weak Liberal laws to create lawlessness and chaos on our streets.

The consequences are stark: Since the Trudeau Liberal government was first elected in 2015, violent crimes have increased 55%, firearms crimes have increased 130% and extortion has increased by a whopping 330%. Sexual assaults are up 76%. Homicides are up 29%.

At the same time as the rates of violent crimes have increased, the Liberal government dismantled most mandatory minimum penalties while subsequently making house arrest much more widely available.

All of this has resulted in disaster. Canadians do not feel safe in the spaces they did before: their homes, streets and neighbourhoods. A recent Leger survey found that more than half of Canadians polled worry about their general safety, with 54% agreeing that “. . . the justice system — the courts and the laws — is working against the interests of law-abiding citizens.” And 87% of those respondents agreed with using reasonable force against an intruder. That is concerning, but it is an understandable response when only a year ago, Toronto police advised Torontonians to leave their keys near the front door to avoid conflict with thieves trying to steal their vehicles. What a sad state that is, honourable senators. And this lack of public confidence in our justice system can be traced back to the Trudeau Liberal government dismantling the tougher laws put in place by Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s government. It is fundamental that the Canadian public has confidence in the criminal justice system.

Eventually, even the Trudeau government was forced to realize that they had to roll back some of their disastrous soft-on-crime measures that had not only proven to be ineffective but, in fact, had also made the problem significantly worse.

A public backlash prompted the Trudeau Liberal government to bring in some changes under Bill C-48. This bill established some reverse onuses and tightened bail for a small number of offences, largely those involving firearms. But as I stated then, it certainly fell far short of the comprehensive bail reform demanded by provincial and territorial premiers on behalf of Canadians.

Now in Bill C-14, the Carney Liberal government has continued to incrementally dismantle their erroneous criminal justice legislation. It’s one step, but it doesn’t go far enough. Many of the Liberal government ministers today were part of the cabinet that first enacted these lax crime policies, notably including the now-Minister of Justice Sean Fraser. It is no surprise their version of criminal law reform doesn’t go far enough in this bill. As with so many other Liberal crime prevention initiatives, it is largely insufficient.

With that said, let us turn our attention to the content of Bill C-14. The bill attempts to strengthen the bail system by clarifying what is known as the principle of restraint. The Liberal government introduced this guiding principle for bail decisions in their omnibus justice legislation, Bill C-75. The principle of restraint mandates that primary consideration should be given to releasing an offender at the earliest opportunity and imposing the least onerous conditions required. Unsurprisingly, the government has found that courts and justices of the peace, at times, misapplied this principle, resulting in the inappropriate release of some offenders. Devastatingly, this has led to recidivism that has created additional victims of crime and undermined public confidence in our justice system.

Bill C-14 aims to clarify that this principle should not be interpreted to mean that an accused must be released automatically. It underlines that courts and justices of the peace must detain where justified for safety or for the legal grounds for detention. Further, it clarifies that several hybrid offences should be treated as indictable offences at the bail stage unless and until the Crown elects to proceed summarily.

Bill C-14 tightens bail in three ways. First, it specifies factors that a judge must consider when making a bail decision, including whether the alleged offence involved random and unprovoked violence. Second, it expands release conditions for certain offences, including organized crime, extortion, motor vehicle theft and breaking and entering of a dwelling-house. Third, in more serious cases, the court is not required to apply the ladder principle, whereby the prosecution must justify why a less onerous level of release is inadequate before arriving at a level that is more restrictive. Effectively, this means that the prosecution can propose a more restrictive level from the outset.

Bill C-14 expands the situations where a reverse onus is required, meaning that in those cases the accused bears the burden to justify why they should not be detained. A reverse onus demonstrates Parliament’s intention that bail should be more difficult to obtain. It is an important signal sent from Parliament to the courts. In Bill C-14, reverse onus offences are expanded to include certain serious violent situations — for example, where strangling, choking or suffocating is alleged — as well as human trafficking, aggravated motor vehicle theft, extortion with violence, breaking and entering of a dwelling-house and certain immigration-related offences.

Bill C-14 directs courts to place greater emphasis on denunciation and deterrence in cases of motor vehicle theft accompanied by violence, repeat breaking and entering and offences committed in association with organized crime.

Furthermore, the bill restricts the availability of house arrest for certain sexual offences, including those which involve bodily harm, assault or exploitation of a person with a disability, and sexual offences against a minor when prosecuted by indictment.

For a small number of offences, Bill C-14 allows consecutive sentencing. In particular, this would apply in cases of aggravated motor vehicle theft and for extortion committed in the same event as arson.

Bill C-14 expands aggravating factors for sentencing to include what is termed commercial theft, meaning the resale, barter or fraudulent return of goods, or where an offence disrupts essential infrastructure, such as the theft of copper wire from infrastructure, which can jeopardize safety. Other aggravating factors would be whether a victim is providing services in the course of their duties, including first responders, and whether an offence involved the use, attempted use or threatened use of violence and whether an offender has a recent violent conviction within the last five years.

Bill C-14 amends the definition of “violent offence” under the Youth Criminal Justice Act to also include an offence which results in bodily harm. As well, this bill allows police to publish identifying information about a young person without a court order in emergency cases where this is an imminent risk of serious harm or to facilitate arrest.

It should be noted that after Bill C-14 was introduced in the House of Commons late last October, the Liberal government then did not call it for debate for more than three months. Once the bill was sent to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, this committee was able to hold only two meetings of witnesses, besides the minister and departmental officials, before reporting back to the House.

Even within a compressed time frame, our Conservative members of Parliament significantly amended Bill C-14. Conservatives strengthened protections for front-line transit workers by ensuring that all transit employees and contractors are covered, not just operators. They tightened the bail system by preventing serious offenders convicted of an indictable offence within the last 10 years from acting as surety for another accused’s release. That one strikes me as a no-brainer. It would be a little bit like the fox guarding the henhouse. But this is what we have come to expect of this Liberal government’s crime policies, so I’m glad the Conservatives have amended this bill to avoid that in the future.

Another Conservative amendment created a reverse onus in situations where serious repeat violent offenders commit new crimes while already on release. And another called upon the justice minister to table annual reports on the bail system, including rates of recidivism and compliance. Conservative members of the committee also supported measures to classify serious firearms and weapons offences as violent offences under youth justice law, reinforcing that gun crime is violent crime regardless of age.

Many of these amendments, and thereby some of the best parts of Bill C-14, stem from Conservative private members’ bills. I want to highlight some of those because in many cases, private members’ bills are the result of years of parliamentarians’ efforts.

Many of you will remember our esteemed Senate colleague, the Honourable Bob Runciman, former chair of the Senate Legal Committee. His Bill S-221 was the impetus for the provision in the Criminal Code that made assault of a transit operator an aggravating factor for the purpose of sentencing. Bill S-221 received Royal Assent in February 2015 — only 17 of us in this chamber were sitting senators at that time. My current Conservative MP colleague Roman Baber brought forward the amendment to Bill C-14 that expands this provision to include public transit employees.

Then there was private member’s Bill C-321, the initiative my Conservative colleague and friend Todd Doherty has advocated for many years. Mr. Doherty’s bill would have required judges to consider the fact that the victim of an assault is a person who provides health services or a first responder to be an aggravating circumstance for sentencing. He worked tirelessly and collaboratively to pass that bill unanimously in the House of Commons, and it had progressed here in the Senate, where it was awaiting third reading when Prime Minister Trudeau prorogued Parliament in January 2025. The bill died on the Order Paper.

Our Conservative Senate opposition leader, Senator Housakos, revived that bill in this Parliament as Bill S-233. He shepherded it through the Senate and back into the House of Commons in October 2025, where it recently had second reading debate in February. It is interesting that the Liberal government did not just expedite passage of that bill instead of absorbing its content into Bill C-14, but I guess they wanted the credit for the good idea. We’ve seen this happen many times before, including with our Conservative election platform in the last election.

My national caucus colleague MP Arpan Khanna has proposed Bill C-242, known as the “Jail Not Bail” bill. This comprehensive private member’s bill is much stronger than Bill C-14. It would replace the Liberals’ “principle of restraint” with public safety as the primary consideration for release decisions. Rather than just reversing the onus for bail for certain serious crimes, as we see in Bill C-14, the Jail Not Bail Bill would ensure that chronic repeat offenders and those charged with major reverse-onus offences would start from a presumption of the accused being detained rather than a presumption of the accused being released. And where Bill C-14 encourages “consideration” of the number and gravity of the accused’s outstanding charges, Mr. Khanna’s bill would mandate that an accused’s full record and list of outstanding charges be taken into account for bail decisions.

Bill C-242 was the genesis of the Conservative amendment for Bill C-14 which prohibits criminals with a recent conviction from standing as the surety for an accused. Mr. Khanna’s bill also proposes that the Minister of Justice table an annual report on judicial interim release, including recidivism, outcomes and effectiveness, which was also accepted as an amendment to Bill C-14.

Conservative MP Frank Caputo has proposed a private member’s bill, Bill C-225, which would prosecute murder of an intimate partner as murder in the first degree whether or not it was premeditated. The bill would also prohibit release if an accused was at large on a release order regarding an intimate partner offence, or if the accused was convicted on an intimate partner offence in the five years preceding the arrest.

Mr. Caputo titled his private member’s bill “Bailey’s Law,” in honour of Bailey McCourt. Bailey was a young woman from Kamloops, British Columbia, who was the tragic victim of intimate partner violence. In his House of Commons speech, Mr. Caputo explained her situation this way:

. . . Bailey was a young woman, a mother and a survivor of intimate partner violence. This summer, her former partner was convicted of abusing her, and within hours, he left the courtroom and murdered her. That allegation is before the court. Along with her was one of her friends, a relatively new friend, who survived.

Bailey’s ex-partner James Plover was on bail at the time of the alleged attack. Plover was originally charged with second-degree murder in the killing, but the Crown has since upgraded that charge to first-degree murder and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle resulting in bodily harm.

Bailey’s family has been impassioned advocates for Mr. Caputo’s bill. I was fortunate to meet Bailey’s aunt Debbie Henderson in late January at the national Conservative Convention.

Bill C-225 would allow a court to create a risk assessment period for up to seven days in cases involving intimate partner violence or threats. This would give time for a judge to adequately evaluate the level of risk for an offender’s potential release.

Bill C-14 does somewhat attempt to address the post-conviction/pre-sentence release that had such devastating consequences for Bailey McCourt. Bill C-14 stipulates that the Crown can contest release upon conviction in cases of intimate partner violence. In that situation, a reverse onus would apply, where the burden would be on the offender to sufficiently justify why he or she should not remain detained. However, a reverse onus is not a presumption of detention; it only shifts the burden and is not a true safety default. As Peter Copeland of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute told the House of Commons Justice Committee:

. . . when we focus just on bail through the creation of reverse onuses, you can end up swelling the remand population and not affecting sentencing. . . .

I’m sure there are many of us here whose lives, whose friends or family have been profoundly affected by crimes of intimate partner violence. In my case, it was my legal assistant when I was a lawyer in Regina. Her name was Michelle Lenius. At 32 years old and a mother of three, Michelle was a smart, dynamic, hard-working and resilient woman. On October 17, 2003, Michelle’s estranged husband, Kevin Lenius, attacked her. Kevin had been lying in wait in Michelle’s home while she was out. When she came in, he assaulted her, including by choking, until she blacked out, and he raped her. He threatened to kill her if she went to the police. Yet somehow, Michelle did find the courage to report Kevin’s terrible crimes.

After spending a single night in jail, Kevin was released on an undertaking to keep the peace and be on good behaviour. At the time of release, in an extremely quick court proceeding, the judge had not heard all the facts of the case. I believe if he had, things might have turned out very differently.

There was a restraining order imposed, but Kevin and Michelle still had contact because of their children. Two weeks later, Kevin insisted Michelle had to pick up their two youngest children, aged 5 and 3, from Kevin’s house. When she arrived, the kids were in a bedroom. Kevin grilled Michelle about her new relationship and, enraged, he strangled her for two minutes until she was dead. He took their children to a neighbour’s house, returned to Michelle’s body, washed her face and called the police.

I attended the closing statements of Kevin Lenius’s murder trial. Crown prosecutor Al Johnston delivered an extremely compelling address to the jury. He poignantly expressed the absolute brutality of two minutes of strangulation by telling the jury, “And Kevin started to strangle her.” And then the Crown prosecutor paused. “He’s still strangling her.” And he paused. “And he’s still strangling her.” He continued to do this until two minutes had expired in the courtroom, at which point he said, “And now she’s dead.”

Kevin Lenius was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole eligibility for 12 years.

Michelle’s family, friends and co-workers at our law firm were devastated by her tragic death.

Michelle’s murder was a primary reason my late husband, former MP Dave Batters, decided to run for political office a few months later. In 2008, Dave introduced, as his first private member’s bill, Bill C-519, which would have required Crown prosecutors to present all the facts of a case to the judge when he or she is ruling on bail for a serious personal injury offence. When he gave his second reading speech on the bill, Dave said he also wanted to include a reverse onus for these serious offences. It was the last speech Dave gave in Parliament, and it was widely supported on all sides.

I believe if Dave’s bill had been enacted at that time, there could have been a very different outcome for Michelle Lenius.

After 11 years of Liberal governments dismantling the serious tough-on-crime laws Conservatives put in place, Canadians are still suffering with the consequences of some of the same significant, dangerous holes in our justice system. The Liberal government’s Bill C-5 removed many mandatory minimum penalties, even some that were not struck down by the courts. It dramatically widened the number of offences to which house arrest or conditional sentences could potentially apply. Some of these crimes were serious: criminal harassment, sexual assault and forcible confinement, to name only a few.

In Bill C-14, the Liberal government has had to restrict conditional sentence orders — house arrest — from being available for certain sexual offences, including child sexual offences. I would certainly hope so. Conditional sentences should be prohibited in cases where sexual crimes involve children, period. For most Canadians, that is not even a debatable question.

Even if Bill C-14 limits the application of conditional sentence orders in certain sexual offences, the core problem the Liberal government created in Bill C-5 still exists: the broadening of eligibility for serving “custody at home” in the community.

During third reading debate on Bill C-5 in 2022, I warned:

Removing mandatory minimum sentences and making serious offences eligible for conditional sentences will only create more vulnerable female victims by returning abusers and criminals into the communities where their victims live and work. This bill is absolutely going in the wrong direction.

Tragic cases like Bailey McCourt’s or my friend Michelle’s show exactly the repercussions of releasing violent offenders back into their communities. Frankly, too often it ends up being women who pay the price for these reckless policy decisions.

That’s why I was shocked to discover that the Carney Liberal government’s own Gender-based Analysis Plus document for Bill C-14 doesn’t even specifically mention the impact this bill will have on female victims of crime. I think that’s very telling, and I think it’s shameful.

International Women’s Day was earlier this week. In celebration, Prime Minister Carney put out a press release to once again affirm just how much this Liberal government cares about women. In it, he wrote, “There can be no equality — and no prosperity — without safety. . . .” It’s high time for this Prime Minister to back up that talk with some action.

The Liberal government has spent the past decade out of touch with the Canadian public’s concerns about a lax justice system. However, now that it is an unavoidable issue at the polls, the Carney government has decided it needs to do something — anything — to make itself look relevant on this issue.

While Bill C-14 moves toward tightening up the bail system, reversing the onus for certain serious offences and creating some new aggravating factors for sentencing, it still falls short of what is needed to repair our criminal justice system. While the bill clarifies that early release should not be automatic, it fails to direct that dangerous repeat criminal offenders should remain in custody. The safety of the community should be prioritized over the convenience of the accused.

And while the title of Bill C-14 is the “Bail and Sentencing Reform Act,” precious little in the bill increases criminal sentences. Only one offence — contempt of court — carries an increased sentence in the bill. It seems that the use of the term “sentencing” in the title is to make it seem as if the Liberal government is doing something, even when it really isn’t.

When Bill C-14 was introduced in the House of Commons last October, the crime of extortion had already been increasing at an incredible rate. Cities like Surrey, British Columbia, and Brampton, Ontario, have been fighting a rising tide of extortion crime. What once was extortion aimed at businesses by organized crime has become increasingly personal, with transnational gangs aiming their attacks at individuals and families.

Bill C-14 contains only minimal measures to deal with this issue, including a reverse onus for extortion involving violence, a weapons ban as a bail condition for extortion and consecutive sentencing when both extortion and arson occur in the same event.

Many of the changes in Bill C-14 are similarly incremental. My colleague Conservative MP Tamara Kronis asked Minister Sean Fraser at the House of Commons Justice Committee what difference this bill will really make. Even he had a hard time telling her.

She said:

I’m wondering if you think you could identify a category of offender who will now be detained, under Bill C-14, who wouldn’t have been detained under the existing law.

Minister Fraser replied:

One thing that’s really important is that we don’t categorize offenders. Criminal law is uniquely individualistic, as is sentencing and as are bail hearings. It’s really important to me that we maintain the ability of the court to dig into the facts of an individual case.

He continued, saying:

I think that categorizing offenders as groups of people would be a dangerous prediction to make.

When Ms. Kronis asked one of the Justice Department officials a similar question later in that same meeting, the official replied:

No one can automatically be denied bail, and we can’t guarantee that certain provisions are going to result in the detention of anyone, because judges will always have discretion at the bail stage of proceedings, to be consistent with the charter . . .

It is small wonder the Canadian legal system has become “release by default” — and it seems that even though the government is saying Bill C-14 will change that, it is clearly not really its intention to do so. Further proof was the Liberal government’s refusal to vote for a Conservative amendment at committee that would have made public safety and security the primary considerations for release, rather than the principle of restraint. But the government had no interest in that.

Liberal MPs also rejected several other Conservative amendments on Bill C-14. They voted against requiring consecutive sentences for repeat human traffickers, meaning these serious repeat offenders would not automatically face stacked penalties for human trafficking crimes. Liberals voted against mandatory detention in certain cases involving serious repeat offenders who reoffend while on release, choosing discretion over clear safeguards. They voted against strengthening passport surrender requirements for high-risk accused individuals, even in reverse onus situations. And Liberals voted against expanding ineligibility for house arrest for serious offences such as human trafficking, robbery and weapons trafficking, leaving open the possibility of conditional sentences in cases many Canadians believe warrant jail time.

The Liberals have made a definite start with Bill C-14, but they remain unwilling to make more changes that will protect Canadians and return justice to our justice system. This bill doesn’t restore the mandatory minimum penalties Liberal soft-on-crime legislation has repealed. The very limited restrictions it places on conditional sentencing orders don’t go far enough, meaning some people committing robbery, gun and trafficking offences can still access house arrest.

Bill C-14 goes some distance but still leaves a high degree of discretion with respect to sentencing. This bill gives judicial guidance for “consideration” in release decisions but stops short of setting bars that will say that enough is enough.

Honourable senators, Canadians have had enough. The public has lost confidence in a justice system that too often seems to favour the rights of serious criminals over the protection of victims. In real time, we’re watching the consequences of Liberal catch-and-release policies unfold. You’ll have a hard time convincing me — or, frankly, millions of Canadians — that the weakening of deterrence has been to the benefit of our society.

Even the Liberal government must recognize this on some level. They’ve introduced Bill C-14 to attempt, if half-heartedly, to fix the problem they themselves helped to engineer. How many more bills will this Liberal government need to pass to try to dig themselves out of this hole? We’ve had Bill C-48 and now Bill C-14; Bill C-16 will come here soon.

Honourable senators, in the meantime, I ask you to send Bill C-14 to be studied — and, hopefully, improved — at the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs so that we can begin to examine ways we can improve this bill to restore Canadians’ confidence in our criminal justice system and return safety to our streets.

Thank you.

Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?

Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.

An Hon. Senator: On division.

(Motion agreed to and bill read second time, on division.)